William Bailey’s Post

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Owner at WB Creative Consulting, LLC

A terrifying realization washed over me as the presentation began. It started innocently enough. Although we were gathered in a poorly ventilated gymnasium for my daughter's 4th grade graduation, the slide show promised to make up for any physical discomfort by being a heartfelt collection of cuteness showcasing the growth and learning journeys of my daughter and her classmates as they moved from kindergarten on up to 4th grade. That's when it dawned on me: we're going to see at least 6 slides per student, with at least 40 students total. And each slide had been created by the students themselves, so any hope of skipping ahead by the very nice librarian manually advancing each slide with the vigor of a sloth was faint at best. As the sweat dripped down my back, and the multiplication tore through my amygdala, I experienced an odd blend of panic and recognition. This 30-minute, 240+ panel user-generated slide show, seemed uncannily familiar. Where have I seen this before? Of course. Every brand with a marketing department is doing this right now with AI generated content. This is why webpages seem disjointed, communication narratives are non-existent, and everyone in the organization is now suddenly responsible for writing content (even the engineers). We in the marketing world are currently witnessing an endless parade of user generated AI content in a big sweaty gymnasium where everyone is a creator and quality control doesn't exist. And yes, the content is at about a 4th grade reading level. Listen, I'm all about efficiencies, and giving teams the tools the need to succeed. But you can't hand a bunch of 9-year-olds the keys to your marketing machine and expect the end result to be an engaging, thoughtful, actionable representation of your brand. Instead, you get the world's longest PowerPoint that is nearly impossible to review for spelling errors, duplicate slides, inappropriate content, and a unifying theme that reminds your audience why you do what you do, and why that should inspire them to schedule a demo, download a white paper, [fill in your call to action]. True, Google is destroying traditional content marketing by promoting it's laughably inaccurate AI Answers, the massive influx of AI-generated articles, books, and reviews makes it nearly impossible to tell what's real and what's rigged, and tech companies continue to layoff staff they've deemed nonessential, such as marketing, recruiting, and even customer support teams. So maybe none of this really matters, the entire playbook is being thrown out, and we'll just have to wait and see what happens. But I'm not going to pretend any of these developments are good for conventional marketing skillsets, just as I'm not going to pretend it was a great idea to have 4th graders crowd source a multimedia project using clip art. And just in case you couldn't tell, this post was written without the use of AI tools.

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